Her royal heilness: Berlin show revisits the artist who turned the Queen into a Nazi
The late Christoph Schlingensief was one of German art’s great provocateurs. Can his B-Movie horror aesthetics still shock us into thinking anew about media power, colonialism, and the far right? Christoph Schlingensief certainly knew how to provoke. “Fury at German play that shows Queen as a Nazi,” read the Sunday Express’s headline after Kaprow City first premiered at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre in 2006. Drawing…
Key points
- A Berlin exhibition revisits Christoph Schlingensief's 2006 play Kaprow City, which showed the Queen giving a Nazi salute.
- The show at Gropius Bau includes tabloid headlines and the rotating stage he called the animatograph.
- His widow Aino Laberenz says his work still speaks to media power and far-right politics today.
A new exhibition at Berlin's Gropius Bau revisits the legacy of German artist Christoph Schlingensief, whose 2006 play Kaprow City caused outrage by showing the then Queen performing a Hitler salute. The play, first staged at Berlin's Volksbühne theatre, focused on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The show, titled It's Not My Problem Anymore, Deal With Your Own Shit, places Kaprow City at its centre. In the gallery's neo-Renaissance atrium, visitors see remains of the carousel-like rotating stage Schlingensief called the animatograph, surrounded by enlarged tabloid headlines and articles.
What the play contained
Kaprow City drew on the happenings of US performance artist Allan Kaprow. One scene showed the Queen giving a Hitler salute, while another re-enacted the paparazzi chase that led to Diana's fatal crash. Diana appeared in bed beside two men with Down's syndrome, and Camilla was pelted with animal blood.
Schlingensief said the work was not meant as provocation but as an investigation into how Diana became a modern icon. A German newspaper headline displayed in the exhibition asks: "Will Diana's sons stop Schlingensief?" after rumours the royals might take legal action.
I keep noticing in the commentary how much he is missed. But I also like to say that it's up to us, whether we work in the arts or not, not to hand responsibility over to someone else so that we no longer have to act.
— Aino Laberenz
The artist's wider legacy
Stage designer Aino Laberenz, Schlingensief's widow who manages his estate, says the combination of Lady Di, speculation about her death and the myth around her fascinated him. She cautions against viewing Kaprow City only through Diana, saying it belonged to a wider artistic universe where theatre, film and art collided with questions of media power.
The exhibition also covers his confrontational work on the far right. In his version of Hamlet, former far-right extremists re-enacted the central murder scene at Schauspielhaus Zürich and later Berlin's Volksbühne. A quote on the exhibition wall reads: "We're not playing Hamlet, we're playing Germany."
